The Yellow Gates

Some places don't just hold memories. They hold you.

March 8, 2024. 2:04 pm. That’s when my dad died.

We thought it was beatable. That’s the cruel part. Not that cancer took him. That for a while we actually believed we’d win this one.

The last real conversation I had with him was leaving his hospital room. I told him I’d see him soon. He said, “I don’t know how much time I have.”

Then he looked right at me and said, “But you don’t know how much you have either.”

I’ve thought about that line almost every day since.

Twenty Five Plus Years of Carrying Something That Wasn’t His

For over 25 years, my dad lived out his calling as director of Camp Pinehill Baptist Retreat. If you know camp people, you know what that means. It’s not a job. It’s a life.

But here’s the thing about my dad and that camp: he didn’t own it, and he never acted like he did. He was carrying something other people started long before him. People who showed up on that land and introduced kids to Jesus before he ever walked through those gates himself.

He just picked it up where they left off. And he ran with it for over two decades.

Why I Went Back

It’s been two years since I came through those yellow gates of Pinehill. This time I was helping to lead a group of students from our church for summer camp.

But underneath that, I knew something else was true. I knew it was time for me to go back too. Not just to give students a week away from their normal life, but to let this place do what it does for me.

I didn’t tell most of the students why the trip meant something different for me this time. I just watched them drive-thru the same gates I did, toward the same lake I jumped in as a kid, and felt something settle in me that I hadn’t felt in years.

Four Kids of My Own

My wife and our kids came on this trip too. They’ve been to camp before, this wasn’t new for them.

But this time was different.

I watched them do the same things they always do: make friends, stay up too late laughing about nothing, glide the water on a paddle board, live in that easy, unguarded way kids do at camp. Except this time I was watching all of it through a different lens. I knew what that ground had cost our family, and I knew what it had given us.

My dad carried something forward that wasn’t his. Now my own kids are part of that same story too, even if they don’t fully understand that yet.

That’s not something I planned. It’s just what happens when you go back to a place that shaped you, grieving someone who shaped it, and bring your family along for the ride.

My dad’s fingerprints are everywhere, not because he built a monument to himself, but because he poured himself into something bigger than himself. Staff he trained. Campers he prayed over. Keith and Claire Darnell lead the staff now, still pointing kids to Jesus in the same cabins, on the same trails, under the same sky he loved.

My dad is not there. He never was the one holding it together anyway, and he knew that. The Lord was. The Lord still is.

The Days I Still Want to Call Him

Grief doesn’t move in a straight line.

Some days I’m fine. Some days I still reach for my phone to call him about something dumb: a ballgame, a decision, nothing important. Then I remember.

I still haven’t deleted his number. I don’t think I ever will.

Losing him has been the hardest and most complicated thing I’ve walked through. I’m not going to pretend otherwise or wrap it in a bow. It’s just been hard.

But standing on that camp ground again, something shifted. Not because the grief disappeared. It didn’t. But I could feel, in a way I can’t fully explain, that the Lord heals. Not on our timeline. Not in the way we’d script it.

From Middle Schooler to a Man Bringing Students of His Own

I first walked through those gates as a middle school kid looking for a summer of fun. I had no idea that decades later I’d walk back through them as a grown man, leading a group of teenagers, looking for something a lot deeper myself: healing, and maybe a little closure.

That’s the thing about the places that shape us. They don’t just hold memories. They hold us.

Going back wasn’t about escaping the present. It was about letting God meet me in a place that already knew my story, while it was busy writing new stories for a whole new group of kids, and my family.

My dad told me I didn’t know how much time I had. He was right. None of us do.

So I’m trying to live like it. Trying to carry forward things that aren’t about me, the way he did. Trying to let the Lord use whatever time I’ve got, the way he let camp use his, not to build his name, but to point people to Jesus’s. That’s why I brought those students, and my own kids. Not for me. For them.

Where Love Goes

I still miss him every single day.

The singer/songwriter Stephen Wilson Jr. has a lyric that captures something true:

Grief is just love that no longer has anywhere to go.

All that love I had for my dad didn't disappear when he did. It's still there. It just doesn't have anywhere to land anymore, not the way it used to.

Except that’s not entirely true.

Because I stood at those yellow gates with my family and a new group of kids finding what I found decades ago, and I realized the love didn’t run out of places to go after all. It just found new ones.

It shows up when I watch my own kids walking the nature trails or jumping into the pool. It shows up when I see a teenager from our church meet Jesus on ground that shaped me. It shows up every time someone walks through that gate looking for something they didn’t know they needed, the same way I did as a middle schooler, the same way my dad did for over two decades.

Grief didn’t get the final word. Love found somewhere to go.

Not just grief.

Peace, sitting right next to it.